The HCAHPS survey, also known as CAHPS Hospital Survey, or Hospital CAHPS, is a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perspectives of hospital care.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has partnered with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), another agency in the Department of Health and Human Services, to develop HCAHPS—the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey.

CFRI has been assigned as an approved vendor to conduct HCAHPS surveys.

The purpose of HCAHPS is to uniformly measure and publicly report patient’s perspectives on their inpatient care.  While many hospitals collect information on patients’ satisfaction with care, there has previously been no national standard for collecting this information that would yield valid comparisons across all hospitals.

The HCAHPS initiative is intended to provide a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients’ perspectives on hospital care. 

HCAHPS can be viewed as a core set of questions that can be combined with a customized set of hospital-specific items.  HCAHPS is meant to complement the data hospitals currently collect to support improvements in internal customer services and quality related activities

• HCAHPS is the first truly national, standardized, publicly reported benchmark of hospital patients' perspectives of their care
• As part of the Reporting Hospital Quality Data Annual Payment Update (RHQDAPU) program, hospitals that are subject to IPPS payment provisions ("subsection (d) hospitals") must collect and submit HCAHPS data in order to receive their full IPPS annual payment update (APU) for fiscal year 2008, and forward. IPPS hospitals that fail to report the required quality measures, which include the HCAHPS survey, may receive an APU that is reduced by 2.0 percentage points.
• The survey will be administered to a random sample of live discharges who were 18 or older at admission, had an inpatient overnight stay, and had a non-psychiatric diagnosis
• Patients will be surveyed throughout each month and data submitted to CMS (via QualityNet Exchange) on a monthly or quarterly basis
• Hospitals may preview their HCAHPS results prior to public reporting

The benefits of telephone based research with CFRI for your HCAHPS needs include:

Higher quality data – no missed or misunderstood items
When interviewers control the data collection, respondents can ask for clarification and will be provided with meaningful information.

Unlike paper surveys, there are no skipped items, no scribbling in the margins, no unintelligible information.

Easy and fast customization
 The high flexibility of CATI research means that your custom questions can be added or modified on very short notice, and often at little or no additional cost.

Where as, mail surveys must be reprinted and resent if they are changed, resulting in delays and additional costs.

Higher response rates and faster turnaround
Mail surveys require more time for the surveys to be delivered returned and processed – 6 weeks on average. With telephone research, the survey can go into the field as soon as the contact information is received. Data is processed as the interview proceeds, leaving no downtime between survey completion and data delivery.

Higher response rates means better data reliability.

A more enjoyable survey experience
Your customers will appreciate the personalized attention of a highly qualified live interviewer. It shows a level of commitment to your clients.

CFRI’s interviewers establish rapport, provide encouragement and a strong rationale for doing the survey, and give clients the sense of having been truly heard.

• We offer the most cost effective methodology for hospitals.
• Our experience will increase the likelihood of obtaining the desired number of completed surveys monthly.
• Our skills and resources allow us to reach patients quicker, enabling professional interviewers to obtain completed surveys as soon as possible following discharge.